I'm writing the next book in The Alchemancer series. It's called The Nullification Engine and should be out soon. As a way to keep readers updated on my progress and also so I can gauge the same, each week I take a look at my current writing progress and report it here. Also, I discuss some other areas revolving around the business side of things.

One of my better weeks this past one in terms of writing progress. You can see the numbers below. But, first, some other business.

First off, I realized I've got a lot more to talk about than just my writing progress on the new book. In fact, personally, I think the more interesting stuff is what's going on outside of me actually writing words. To that end, I'm transmogrifying this weekly post (sounds like something Aaron would say—Aaron is a character in The Five Elements) into more of a generic progress sort of thing. Hope you like.

Maps

The map for The Hall of the Wood has been inserted into the eBook version and released to all retailers. It's a bit hard to make the details out on a b/w eReader, but it looks great on a color tablet, especially when you can zoom in and move around via touch. For those with b/w eReaders, however, I put a link in the eBook to go to the World of Uhl site where you can view a full-sized, color version of the map. It's the best compromise I can offer.

Today I'll be working on getting the map into the print version of The Hall of the Wood. That shouldn't take too long, but the files will have to be submitted to CreateSpace and it takes them a little bit to approve everything. As I reported last week, print versions of my books are back.

As for the map for The Five Elements, I'll be working on getting that into the eBook and print versions this next week. The reveal will be here on this blog next Friday.

Meanwhile my cartographer is busy working away on the next map which is the regional map to go along with The Nullification Engine. It's basically a zoomed out version of the same map from The Five Elements but with more detail as our characters move on to their next adventure.

Reviews

I've gotten away from posting about individual reviews which is something I did early on, especially if it was a good one. However, since I did get a couple of nice reviews recently, I'll go ahead and highlight them here.

I received one review for The Hall of the Wood (you can click-through to read the text):

A Top 500 Amazon reviewer, no less. No complaints here.

And I also received two reviews for The Five Elements:

Humbled is my only reaction. And appreciative.

Writing Progress

Now to what really matters for those waiting for the next book. Here's the numbers:

Date

Current Word
Count

Words Written

Words/Day

Words
Remaining

% Complete

12/1/2012

0

0

0

155,000

0.00%

12/8/2012

20,019

20,019

3,337

134,981

12.92%

12/15/2012

24,425

4,406

734

130,575

15.76%

12/22/2012

30,027

5,602

934

124,973

19.37%

12/29/2012

32,059

2,032

339

122,941

20.68%

1/5/2013

34,757

2,698

450

120,243

22.42%

1/12/2013

38,923

4,166

694

116,077

25.11%

1/19/2013

44,503

5,580

930

110,497

28.71%

So, 930 words/day. 5,580 words written. That puts me at almost 29% done. I'm still working through some previously written words, but the gap is closing. Total I have about 50,000 words in the document. I should hopefully finish working through that this next week and then I'll really be breaking new ground.

Overall, I like where things are going. I'm working from a pretty tight outline, so it's just a matter of putting the bricks in the right place.

I'll close with the usual graphs. I like the way the % Progress one is trending upward.

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